Kevin Jackson

NEXT GENERATION about English writer Zadie Smith, 23, and her debut novel, “White Teeth”… [E]ven if you ignore the notice her work has already generated—a hefty two-book deal, an advance rave from Salman Rushdie, who calls “White Teeth” an “astonishingly assured debut”—and try to read it with an open mind, you soon become aware of her exceptional talent. For one thing, Smith breaks the iron rule that first fictions should be thin slices of autobiography, served dripping with self-pity… She began working on “White Teeth” in her final year at Cambridge, after an editor read one of her short stories in a student publication and asked if she had a novel in the pipeline. “So I lied, and said yes,” Smith says.

SHOUTS & MURMURS about the art of blurb-writing for book-jackets… [T]he book blurb is a minor literary form every bit as exacting and disciplined as the cinquain, the villanelle, or the Petrarchan sonnet. Many illustrious authors have attempted it and failed. Just as Herman Melville never penned a catchy poem, so Samuel Beckett was a hopeless amateur when it came to coughing up a bit of Advance Praise… Those of us in the racket call them the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Blurbing. 1—Gush. As with other forms of flattery, you cannot possibly pile the praise on too thickly… 2—Observe the rule of three. A young anthropologist-turned-marketing-executive once explained to me that, in just about every culture she could think of, the number three represents infinity, and it is true that a skilled blurb artist will naturally gravitate toward verbal triads, in accordance with the idea that three nouns or, better still, three adjectives—“advanced, forthright, significant”—can exhaust the whole universe… 3—Make comparisons with other leading brand names. Exhibit A is the paperback edition of Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods”; or, more precisely, its back cover. “Bryson is…great company right from the start—a lumbering, droll, neatnik intellectual who comes off as equal parts Garrison Keillor, Michael Kinsley and…Dave Barry”—the Times Book Review. Beautifully done: observe the elegant symmetry of treble adjective with treble name-check, the friskiness of “neatnik,” the faint but distinct whiff of a more learned age in “droll.” …4—Know your browser. … 5—Try to be mildly idiosyncratic. .. 6—Make apposite puns… —Learn from the master. … Writer mentions Sheridan’s comedy “The Critic.”